Another case of abuse against a “transgender child”

posted at 10:01 am on March 25, 2016 by Jazz Shaw

I already covered the long awaited and much needed North Carolina bathroom privacy law yesterday so there’s no need to go into all of that again, but the response to the legislation on the left has raised new and even more troubling issues. One of the most vocal proponents of the SJW movement, particularly when it comes to LGBT issues, is WaPo editorial board member Jonathan Capehart. As soon as the North Carolina news hit the wires, Jonathan was off to his keyboard to blame Republicans for all the ills of the world.

This is how cowardly and despicable the Republican-controlled leadership of North Carolina is. In one day, the General Assembly introduced, both chambers passed and Gov. Pat McCrory (R) signed into law a bill that overturned Charlotte’s anti-discrimination law and banned other municipalities from doing same. To be clear here, they stripped fellow citizens of basic civil rights.

I won’t waste much time on this since I covered most of this turf last night, but two points are worth noting. In reverse order, I would first suggest that the Founders of this nation, when laying out the “fundamental rights” of Americans, never got around to addressing who would get to use which bathrooms. (The fact that most of these facilities in that era consisted of holes in the ground with small sheds over them – if you were lucky – may have played a role in that oversight.) As to the issue of a “cowardly” rush to pass the law in a single day which Capehart alludes to, as I pointed out yesterday, the Governor announced that such a response was coming before the Charlotte ordinance was even passed, so that’s simply disingenuous.

Moving on to the more pressing issue of the day, as part of his effort to promote his most recent column, Jonathan asked everyone to go back and check out a video editorial he he produced eleven months ago. In it, he spoke not of adults living the “transgender” lifestyle, but of yet another tragic case of a child being endangered by parents seeking to warp a pre-K aged little girl into a “new gender identity.” The situation in question deals with the family of Mimi and Joe Lemay.

I defy you to watch the NBC Nightly News interview with Mimi and Joe Lemay and not think they are the most amazing parents on the planet. Amazing because they listened when their daughter Mia told them she wanted to be a boy. And with their love and support mixed with admitted trepidation, Mia became Jacob — at the tender age of 4.

You’ll need to review the entire piece to get the full impact, but yes… you read that portion correctly. A family was changing the gender of a four year old little girl. And if you read Jonathan’s entire coverage of the situation, they will be looking at medical intervention when the little girl approaches puberty. “Amazing parents” certainly isn’t the phrase I would have chosen. In fact, criminal suspects comes to mind.

I somehow missed the tale of the Lemay family when it first made the rounds, but this is, unfortunately, not the first time we’ve come across horror stories like this. Last year I wrote at length about another such incident. The Keswani family is similarly attempting to turn their son into a little girl, with their efforts including the use of drugs to stave off puberty. An earlier case caught my attention in June of 2015 when yet another family appeared on a television special featuring their efforts to turn their son Liam into their daughter Lia. I’ll repeat now what I said then about media enablement of these sorts of crimes:

But we’re talking about a ten year old child here. And the process apparently started at the age of five. Something has gone terribly wrong in that house and this child is in serious peril. Are we now at the point where our legal system will take the “decisions” of a five year old into serious consideration on such a permanent, life altering situation? We don’t allow children to get a tattoo, give meaningful consent for sexual intercourse or even take an aspirin (without adult supervision) until a decade or more later than that. Last winter I saw a nephew in the same age group answer the question of what he wanted to be when he grew up. He responded by saying a fire truck. Not a fire fighter. A fire truck. It was a hilarious moment around the Christmas tree, but it also reminds me now that I wouldn’t be leaving it up to him as to whether or not he should start on hormone therapy next week.

But our media has clearly enabled all sorts of insanity to now be taken as normal and it’s spreading in dangerous ways. I can only hope that this television special will draw some attention and get someone on the case here, not to mention seeing if this is going on in other homes as well. Whatever doctor agreed to do this not only needs to have their license taken away… they should be in jail. And Liam needs to be gotten out of that home and into the care of a responsible adult.

The reason these stories tie in so neatly with the North Carolina debate is that we seriously need to get many of these cases into the court system and sent up the chain to the Supreme Court for some final resolution. As long as we’re dealing with adults making their own choices about their bodies, how they dress and related questions, the impact – if any – is minimized. (And when it spreads to these bathroom privacy issues we are at least talking about adults who can fight back in court.) But when it spreads to the dangerous abuse of children we’ve gone several steps too far through the looking glass. I’ll call your attention yet again to the conclusions of the American College of Pediatricians (ACP) on this subject. Two of their many findings deals directly with the subject of early life gender warping and the use of puberty avoidance drugs.

4. Puberty is not a disease and puberty-blocking hormones can be dangerous. Reversible or not, puberty- blocking hormones induce a state of disease – the absence of puberty – and inhibit growth and fertility in a previously biologically healthy child.

6. Children who use puberty blockers to impersonate the opposite sex will require cross-sex hormones in late adolescence. Cross-sex hormones (testosterone and estrogen) are associated with dangerous health risks including but not limited to high blood pressure, blood clots, stroke and cancer.

This should be clearly defined as not just irresponsible parenting or debatable medical care, but criminal neglect and abuse on the part of the parents and an actionable offense by doctors who enable such aberrations through their practice.

Before closing, I would touch on one other aspect of the discussion which Capehart hits in his earlier video editorial. It deals with the entire question of the “T” in LGBT and provides evidence as to why the courts may need to look into this less pressing question as well.

While the nation has been engaged in a 46-year conversation on issues facing lesbians, gay men and bisexuals, it has only just started talking about the T in LGBT — lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. Let’s be honest here, the T has largely been silent because of a visceral discomfort with the issue. Many folks don’t know what transgender issues are or understand them. And the fascination with transition surgery only makes it more difficult for people to focus on the hate, discrimination and stigma that permeate the lives of transgender Americans. But that’s changing as more trans people come out and demand to be heard.

There’s always one area where even the most diametrically opposed debate partners can find agreement and this may be it. There may indeed be a need to finally address the T in LGBT because it shouldn’t even be there. Unlike the reality of being gay, there is no functional basis in 2016 to be talking about either the ancient or more modern definitions of “The T Word.” In the old days it was referred to as transvestite. By this point we should be done with that concept entirely. Norms in clothing have been changing since we first came up with the idea of covering our naked bodies and drawing such lines between the genders is rather pointless. I occasionally get together with a group of Scottish veterans who live near me and they wear kilts for ceremonial occasions. Those look close enough to skirts for most people, but you don’t want to bring it up to these guys unless you’ve saved up for some new dental work. We also generally don’t raise an eyebrow at women wearing pants or even a tuxedo. What adults choose to wear isn’t inflicting any damage on anyone else and it’s really their business.

But the second reading of The T Word is transgender. The simple fact of that matter is that transgenderism isn’t some third gender option. It is an aberration. To start off, I’ll refer you yet again to the conclusions of the ACP which shed some scientific light on the subject.

1. Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait: “XY” and “XX” are genetic markers of health – not genetic markers of a disorder. The norm for human design is to be conceived either male or female. Human sexuality is binary by design with the obvious purpose being the reproduction and flourishing of our species. This principle is self-evident. The exceedingly rare disorders of sex development (DSDs), including but not limited to testicular feminization and congenital adrenal hyperplasia, are all medically identifiable deviations from the sexual binary norm, and are rightly recognized as disorders of human design. Individuals with DSDs do not constitute a third sex.

2. No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one. No one is born with an awareness of themselves as male or female; this awareness develops over time and, like all developmental processes, may be derailed by a child’s subjective perceptions, relationships, and adverse experiences from infancy forward. People who identify as “feeling like the opposite sex” or “somewhere in between” do not comprise a third sex. They remain biological men or biological women.

3. A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking. When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such. These children suffer from gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria (GD), formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID), is a recognized mental disorder in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-V). The psychodynamic and social learning theories of GD/GID have never been disproved.

Considering how much Democrats love to talk about being the party of science when it comes to climate issues, liberals are shockingly shy in terms of discussing it when it comes to transgenderism. There is simply no medical evidence to support it. Even when you delve into the highly unreliable fields of neural patterns, brain scans won’t even reveal if you’re “transgender” or not.

I’m not saying that transgenderism doesn’t exist… merely that it’s not a “third gender choice” or something in need of special protections. What people in this category need and fully deserve (should they choose to seek it) is medical help. The idea of being “transgender” is no more deserving of some special new set of civil rights than is a demand to treat sufferers of Cotard’s Syndrome as if they are actually dead (which I’ve written about before) or to allow victims of Clinical Lycanthropy to rip people’s throats out because they self-identify as werewolves.

This is already far too long of a missive, so I’ll simply close by repeating my call for some final, definitive court action on these questions. More laws such as the one in North Carolina should be passed and we should welcome challenges to them until they finally reach the Supreme Court. If society has become so warped by the SJW that the norms of privacy for women in public restrooms and showers can be abandoned or children can be warped and chemically altered to promote a political agenda then we truly are on the verge of a great collapse. But I’m still enough of a foolish optimist as to believe we haven’t reached that point… yet.